Wine license change

[Brett Glass]

At 10:37 PM 2/9/2002, winedev at admdev.com wrote:
  
>> In that case, it seems to me that his remarks are a complete non sequitur.
>> The source code of "community" projects that license their work under the
>> MIT X or BSD license is every bit as publicly available as that of projects
>> that use the GPL.
>
>No, they are not. On the basis that a developer is not required to pass on
>his code or make it available under X/BSD/etc licenses, 

But a contributor to a community project, by definition, is doing so.

>MANY of the best programmers on GPL or GPL-like projects are commercial
>programmers in real life. 

This puts them at very serious risk.

>Sure, you can say the GPL may taint your
>programming. But whats to stop you being fired because your COMMERCIAL
>work has influenced code you wrote for an open-source project?

If you were to donate code to a collaborative project that is similar
to code that you've seen at work, there can indeed be a problem.

>It is a simple fact that thousands upon thousands of commercial
>programmers work on open-source virally licensed projects. With no problem
>at all. As several people in this discussion keep asking for landmark
>cases to prove the effectiveness of then GPL - can you provide legal
>documentation pointing to GPL contamination of a commercial project?

I believe that there's a case in the courts involving MySQL right now, though
I do not know all of the details.

--Brett Glass